- Word-of-mouth is important to the travel industry, and with CGM word-of-mouth becomes even more relevant because people can get information outside their immediate social circles.

With blogging becoming increasingly popular, travel PR practitioners need to pay attention and start building relationships in the blogosphere, particularly with personal bloggers. Personal bloggers are known for blogging about their own interests, which attracts blog readers. These bloggers can be trusted because they blog about what they genuinely like and enjoy, and they understand the importance of being transparent. This means that being mentioned on a personal blog can bring a lot of positive (or negative) attention to a destination or travel-related company.

Selena Jones, from Oh, the places we will go., is already working with the travel world. She has been on complimentary trips and has received complimentary tickets to various places in order to review her experiences on her blog. She lives in London, and her most recent blog post is about her complimentary visit to The View, a new attraction in London. She blogged about her visit and made her personal experience available to her readers. This, in turn, attracts Selena's readers to The View. It's a win-win situation. The View gets more visitors, and Selena is able to continue to indulge her readers' wanderlust and retain a loyal following.

However, there are many popular bloggers who aren't collaborating with the travel PR world. Jessica Stein, from Tuula, could help many companies, brands, and destinations. Her 33,000 blog followers, 18,000 Twitter followers, and 500,000 Instagram followers prove that. Jessica is very involved in the fashion industry and has already worked with many high-end designers, such as Louis Vuitton, due to the popularity of her blog. She also loves to travel and blogs about her trips around the world, but she could be helping so many companies build unique relationships with travelers. She has worked with designers but not with hotels, airlines, or other travel-related companies. By reaching out to Jessica, the travel world would also be reaching out to her large following, which would help to build relationships with people around the world who would otherwise not have known about a certain company.

These travel bloggers are the new generation of media, and it would be a waste of an opportunity for the travel PR world to not work and build relationships with these personal bloggers.

How do you feel about the opportunities surrounding the travel blogging world?

*This post was created for an assignment for a social media in public relations class at Kennesaw State University.